“You still know how to read?” he asked in dialect, holding out a leaflet. Keeping her hands in her pockets, she replied:
“I do, yes, but when did you learn?”
Then she tried to go by, in vain. Gino obstructed her, he jammed the leaflet into her pocket with a gesture so violent that he scratched her hand with his nail. Lila crumpled it up calmly.
“It’s not even good for wiping your ass,” she said and threw it away.
“Pick it up,” the pharmacist’s son ordered her, grabbing her by the arm. “Pick it up now and you listen to me: yesterday afternoon I asked that cuckold your husband for permission to beat you up and he said yes.”
Lila looked him straight in the eye:
“You went to ask my husband for permission to beat me up? Let go of my arm right now, you shit.”
At that moment Edo arrived, and instead of pretending not to notice, as was to be expected, he stopped.
“Is he bothering you, Cerù?”
It was an instant. Gino punched him in the face, Edo ended up on the ground. Lila’s heart jumped to her throat, and everything began to speed up. She picked up a rock and gripping it solidly struck the pharmacist’s son right in the chest. There was a long moment. While Gino shoved her back against a light pole, while Edo tried to get up, another car appeared on the unpaved road, raising dust. Lila recognized Pasquale’s broken-down car. Here, she thought, Armando listened to me, maybe Nadia, too, they’re well-brought-up people, but Pasquale couldn’t resist, he’s coming to make war. In fact the doors opened, and five men got out, including him. They were men from the construction sites, carrying knotty clubs, and they began hitting the fascists with a methodical ferocity; they didn’t get angry, they planted a single, precise blow intended to knock down the adversary. Lila immediately saw that Pasquale was heading toward Gino, and since Gino was still a few steps away from her she grabbed one of his arms with both hands and said, laughing: You’d better go or they’ll kill you. But he didn’t go; rather, he pushed her away again and rushed at Pasquale. Lila helped Edo get up, and tried to drag him into the courtyard, but it was difficult; he was heavy, and he was writhing, shouting insults, bleeding. He calmed down a little only when he saw Pasquale hit Gino with his stick and knock him to the ground. The confusion increased: debris the men picked up along the side of the street flew like bullets, men were spitting and screaming insults. Pasquale, leaving Gino unconscious, had rushed into the courtyard, with a man wearing only an undershirt and loose blue pants streaked with cement. Both were now bludgeoning Filippo’s booth; he was locked inside, terrorized. Shouting obscenities, they smashed the windows, while the wail of a police siren grew louder. Lila noticed yet again the anxious pleasure of violence. Yes, she thought, you have to strike fear into those who wish to strike fear into you, there is no other way, blow for blow, what you take from me I take back, what you do to me I do to you. But while Pasquale and his people were getting back in the car, while the fascists did the same, carrying off Gino bodily, while the police siren got closer, she felt, terrified, that her heart was becoming like the too tightly wound spring of a toy, and she knew that she had to find a place to sit down as soon as possible. Once she was inside, she collapsed in the hallway, her back against the wall, and tried to calm down. Teresa, the large woman in her forties who worked in the gutting room, was looking after Edo, wiping the blood off his face, and she teased Lila.
“First you pull off his ear, then you help him? You should have left him outside.”
“He helped me and I helped him.”
Teresa turned to Edo, incredulous:
“You helped her?”
He stammered:
“I didn’t like to see a stranger beating her up, I want to do it myself.”
The woman said:
“Did you see how Filippo shat himself?”
“Serves him right,” Edo muttered, “too bad all they broke was the booth.”
Teresa turned to Lila and asked her, with a hint of malice:
“Did you call the Communists? Tell the truth.”
Is she joking, Lila wondered, or is she a spy, who’ll go running to the owner.
“No,” she answered, “but I know who called the fascists.”
“Who?”
“Soccavo.”
40
Pasquale appeared that evening, after dinner, with a grim expression, and invited Enzo to a meeting at the San Giovanni a Teduccio section. Lila, alone with him for a few minutes, said:
“That was a shitty thing to do, this morning.”
“I do what’s necessary.”
“Did your friends agree with you?”
“Who are my friends?”
“Nadia and her brother.”
“Of course they agreed.”
“But they stayed home.”
Pasquale muttered:
“And who says they stayed home?”
He wasn’t in a good mood, in fact he seemed emptied of energy, as if the practice of violence had swallowed up his craving for action. Further, he hadn’t asked her to go to the meeting, he had invited only Enzo, something that never happened, even when it was late, and cold, and unlikely that she would take Gennaro out. Maybe they had other male wars to fight. Maybe he was angry with her because, with her resistance to the struggle, she had caused him to look bad in front of Nadia and Armando. Certainly he was bothered by the critical tone she had used in alluding to the morning’s expedition. He’s convinced, Lila thought, that I don’t understand why he hit Gino like that, why he wanted to beat up the guard. Good or bad, all men believe that after every one of their undertakings you have to put them on an altar as if they were St. George slaying the dragon. He considers me ungrateful, he did it to avenge me, he would like me to at least say thank you.
When the two left, she got in bed and read the pamphlets on work and unions that Pasquale had given her long ago. They helped to keep her anchored to the dull things of every day, she was afraid of the silence of the house, of sleep, of her unruly heartbeats, of the shapes that threatened to break apart at any moment. In spite of her weariness, she read for a long time, and in her usual way became excited, and learned a lot of things quickly. To feel safe, she made an effort to wait for Enzo to return. But he didn’t, and finally the sound of Gennaro’s regular breathing became hypnotic and she fell asleep.
The next morning Edo and the woman from the gutting room, Teresa, began to hang around her with timid, friendly words and gestures. And Lila not only didn’t rebuff them but treated the other workers courteously as well. She showed herself available to those who were complaining, understanding to those who were angry, sympathetic toward those who cursed the abuses. She steered the trouble of one toward the trouble of another, joining all together with eloquent words. Above all, in the following days, she let Edo and Teresa and their tiny group talk, transforming the lunch break into a time for secret meeting. Since she could, when she wanted, give the impression that it wasn’t she who was proposing and disposing but the others, she found more and more people happy to hear themselves say that their general complaints were just and urgent necessities. She added the claims of the gutting room to those of the refrigerated rooms, and those of the vats, and discovered to her surprise that the troubles of one department depended on the troubles of another, and that all together were links in the same chain of exploitation. She made a detailed list of the illnesses caused by the working conditions: damage to the hands, the bones, the lungs. She gathered enough information to demonstrate that the entire factory was in terrible shape, that the hygienic conditions were deplorable, that the raw material they handled was sometimes spoiled or of uncertain origin. When she was able to talk to Pasquale in private she explained to him what in a very short time she had started up, and he, in his peevish way, was astonished, then said beaming: I would have sworn that you would do it, and he set up an appointment with a man named Capone, who was secretary of the union local.